Office Space: Bankers, techies work side-by-side at Lending Club

An employee walks past the first hole of the “Lending Club Country Club” miniature golf course.

An employee walks past the first hole of the “Lending Club Country Club” miniature golf course.

Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

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An employee walks past the first hole of the “Lending Club Country Club” miniature golf course.

An employee walks past the first hole of the “Lending Club Country Club” miniature golf course.

Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

Office Space: Bankers, techies work side-by-side at Lending Club

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Lending Club’s South of Market office brings a certain hairstyle to mind — and it isn’t the clean-cut kind favored on Wall Street, where this company has become something of a darling.

“At one point, I said it was like a mullet,” said Scott Sanborn, chief operating officer at the company. “It’s business in front, party in back. So the back is kind of wide open, very collaborative open work space, and the front is kind of professional-looking office.”

The third floor is the most formal. There’s a reception area and glass-walled conference rooms. Lending Club’s mission statement graces one wall: “Transforming the banking system to make credit more affordable and investing more rewarding.”

The peer-to-peer lending company moved to San Francisco from Redwood City in 2011. The choice of location was “very deliberate,” Sanborn said, because the company’s client base is made up of borrowers and investors. Moving to San Francisco brought it much closer to those clients. “Montgomery is sort of the Wall Street of the West,” Sanborn said. “But we’re South of Market, so we’re kind of halfway between Twitter and Schwab and Wells Fargo.”

Lending Club occupies 5½ floors at 71 Stevenson St. Its biggest team is operations, located on the 11th and 12th floors. The second largest, engineering, is on the second floor. That work area is full of cubicles. Pretty much every wall and surface serves as a whiteboard, leaving cubicle walls covered in notes and charts.

Screens attached to the wall track the team’s performance. For engineers, they show how many bugs are created versus how many are resolved. For the operations team, the screens show how many calls are in the queue, length of wait time, and how many e-mails are in the inbox. Other televisions display market-related data and news.

Away from the more buttoned-up parts of the office, employees have plenty of places to escape work. On the second floor, there’s a playroom with a piano, Foosball table and shuffleboard. There’s also a long, narrow room called the Park, where workers can play beanbag toss. It has a green carpet and wallpaper depicting an outdoor scene. On the 12th floor, there’s a nine-hole mini golf course that starts in a playroom and winds around the cubicles. A spa on the fifth floor gives employees a place to relax and get a massage.

“Every floor has something about it that would make it attractive for people of the other floors to come and get together,” Sanborn said.

Each floor has a themed cafe area with snacks, beverages and seating areas. On the engineering floor, it’s called TechCafe. On the 11th floor, the coffee shop Grace Period serves lattes, cappuccinos and other caffeinated beverages from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Meeting rooms take different forms at Lending Club’s office. Several are named after San Francisco neighborhoods. There’s a Haight, a Bernal Heights and a Fillmore. On the third, formal floor, there are small bowls of jelly beans on each conference room table. Some meeting rooms have a living room feel, with couches, art and toys. One features an inflatable dinosaur toy.

The office brings together people from different areas that don’t always intersect, according to Sanborn.

“We have the Silicon Valley tech startup mentality and personality type: very action-oriented and problem-solving, entrepreneurial mind-set,” he said. “We also have people who come from traditional banking and financial services, which brings an understanding of the regulatory frameworks and the way those systems work.”